Movie aims to uplift Abuja’s urban poor

Geared towards giving faces and voices to the urban poor, the multi-media project, a brain child of MIND (Media, Information & Narrative Development), seeks to strengthen the voices of the urban poor in Nigeria’s capital city Abuja.
Ilse van Lamoen-Isoun, MIND’s co-founder/programme director said: “It especially seeks to share the stories of women and girls, who tend to be hit hardest by the negative outgrowths of urbanisation.”
Lamoen-Isoun, who said it is a project which seeks to tell the story behind the data and numbers through a travelling film festival which will visit low income communities in the FCT, also hopes the dialogue will spiral from the media to the communities and back to the media.
Groffen, who said he was glad to be host the open air event, added that he completely agrees with the project and urged the media and CSOs to join in raising interest for the urban poor and the challenges they encounter.
In an effort to partner with the media and CSOs in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), that were keen to draw public attention to the human rights impacts of urban poverty, Isoun informed that staff of WATCH! partners can qualify for free in-depth training in different areas, including series of multiple-day, hands-on workshops transferring MIND’s tested tools and methods for narrative-based media reporting, gender-sensitive analysis, and non-adversary dialogue techniques, as media professionals.
CSO professionals would be engaged in action learning trajectory focused on the use of media outputs (e.g. film, radio, and social media) to spark bottom-up dialogues on gender and urban poverty, transferring hands-on tools to actively engage community residents Gender Needs Assessments (GNAs), local advocacy, and media dialogues.
With Nigeria’s fast growing and near-exploding population, ‘WATCH!’ will focus on issues bordering on urbanisation, internally displaced people, infrastructure and public facilities.
The project funded by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Nigeria, will also treat issues surrounding social tensions, economic devaluation, gender and women’s rights, catalysts for development and future generations while encouraging bottom-up media reports.
The audience also got a chance to watch MIND’s award-winning film ‘Daughters of the Niger Delta,’ which has travelled across the world and has won five international awards the latest being Al Jazeera’s ‘New Horizon Award.’